Numbeo – compare your cost of living with other places around the world

Numbeo, created by ex-Google engineer Mladen Adamovic, is an ultra cool data site which lets you compare the cost of living in your city with other cities around the country and the world. You can also use the COL Calculator to work out how much better or worse off you’d be if you moved.

What’s really striking is the fact that the cost of living in a significant number of the world’s major cities is just about the same, notwithstanding the lower costs elsewhere in that nation. For instance, Los Angeles, New York, London, Berlin, Tokyo. Interesting.

To collect data Numbeo relies on user inputs and manually collected data from authoritive sources (websites of supermarkets, governmental institutions, other surveys, etc.). There are automatic and semi-automatic filters to filter out noise data. The filter works as follows : if, for a particular price in a city, values are 5, 6, 20 and 4 in short time span, the value 20 is discarded as noise and the average of the remaining data can be used to estimate that the average price of that item in the city is 5. Or to put it briefly, Numbeo uses heuristic techonology.